Dictators like Justin and his pet hobbit need to show the public that, though installed by plutocratic interests, they are in charge.
But more, their delicate egos need insulation from every perceived slight.
Do witness:
Trudeau escalated things further by issuing a directive requiring financial institutions — including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets — to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”). This has resulted, according to the CBC, in “frozen accounts, stranded money and cancelled credit cards.”
Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person.” A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites. In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy.
Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked — and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised — many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.
(Sidebar: now is the time to rat out thy fellow man, even if he has absolutely nothing to do with this popular yet embarrassing movement. But, hey, vendettas! It's the Canadian way!)
Already, a low-level government official in Ontario was fired after her $100 donation came to light. A gelato shop was forced to close when it received threats after its owner was revealed to have donated to the protest. On Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti went on Canadian television to say the quiet part aloud, namely that anyone contributing to “a pro-Trump movement” should be “worried” about their bank accounts and other financial assets being frozen.
(Sidebar: ahem ...)
When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them? Will Canadian financial institutions be forced to play Six Degrees of Deplorables? The fear of being ensnared in the dragnet will surely have a chilling effect on the commercial prospects of those suspected of “unacceptable views,” creating a caste of untouchables whom no one will dare to transact with or help. ...
These elites will soon move on to the next Twitter outrage, but the people of Canada will be living with the consequences of Trudeau’s actions long after every last truck has been towed and the last of the protesters has been cleared by pepper spray, stun grenades, and mounted police on horseback. Indeed, over the weekend, the Ottawa police chief told reporters that they will be pursuing protestors for weeks and months to come: “If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges. Absolutely.”
(Sidebar: and why? Is Elon Musk a target for one's investigation or is he too big to tackle? Beating up a waitiress must be more satisfying, eh, OPP?)
While the emergency order only authorizes the freezing of assets for 30 days, banks and financial institutions will be wary of resuming business relationships with any “designated person” — or anyone they think could be one in the future. Confident that these private businesses will do their dirty work for them, the government will likely back off, but the chilling effect on political dissent will remain. It’s a Western version of China’s social credit system that does not altogether prohibit political dissent but makes it so costly that it becomes impractical to the ordinary citizen.
And this is why spite is important.
**
Canadian authorities have frozen the financial assets of individuals and companies that are allegedly involved in the ongoing protests in Ottawa Mike Duheme, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) deputy commissioner of federal policing, announced on Feb. 20.
Duheme said at a news conference that the RCMP froze 206 financial products, including bank and corporate accounts, and disclosed the information of 56 entities associated with vehicles, individuals, and companies.
RCMP also shared 253 bitcoin addresses with virtual currency exchangers; and froze a payment processing account valued at $3.8 million, Duheme said.
It is unclear what will happen to the money that has been frozen by financial institutions.
“We continue to work at collecting relevant information on persons, vehicles, and companies and remain in daily communication with the financial institution to assist them,” Duheme said.
The Nazis, too, had lists.
**
Why, that doesn't like proof at all:
“We have seen strong evidence that it was the intention of those who blockaded our ports-of-entry in a largely foreign-funded, targeted and coordinated attack,” Blair said, accusing the movement of intentionally idling factories, halting trade and sabotaging our already-fragile supply chain.
“We will not let any foreign entities that seek to do harm to Canada or Canadians erode trust in our democratic institutions, or question the legitimacy of our democracy.”
Those statements left security consultant and former CSIS and CSE intelligence analyst Phil Gurski with more questions than answers.
“That’s a hell of an accusation to make,” he said.
“It’s a fairly alarming accusation that what started out as a protest — whether you believe in it or not is irrelevant, people have a right to protest under the charter — is actually a threat to our sovereignty as a nation.” ...
“I don’t doubt that there are foreign actors involved, I don’t doubt there’s money coming in from the States,” Gurski said.
“But if they’re suggesting that there are other actors that have somehow directed — not just funded — and pulling the strings from abroad, that would mean we have a foreign interference problem.”
He also questions why the government would so casually drop such a startling revelation without providing more information.
“In the past they haven’t hesitated to say ‘the Russians did this’ or ‘the North Koreans did this,’ or ‘the Chinese did this,’ ” Gurski said.
“So why so reticent about who the foreign actors are in this case?”
While inquires to Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino went unacknowledged, a spokesperson for Blair replied to the National Post’s requests for clarity with details on the tools Wednesday’s invocation of the Emergencies Act would provide to law enforcement.
**
I'll just leave these completely unrelated items about money, favouritism and foreign interventionists here.
Nothing to worry about:
There was no guarantee that Khadr would have won any lawsuit, nor that it would have cost the $40 million that Trudeau claimed it would cost to fight Khadr in court. There was no guarantee that Khadr would get anything, be it $20 million, $30 million or $100 million. The Supreme Court of Canada decision made no mention of any money having to be paid to Khadr.
Even if it was inevitable that Canada would eventually have to pay Khadr, why was the money that Trudeau paid to him done quickly and paid in just two weeks after a secret deal was negotiated? According to a government leak, it was done with the intention of sheltering the money from a $134 million civil court judgement, launched by Tabitha Speer, widow of Sergeant Speer, something the government admits to doing. Why not be completely open and transparent about the payment and why shelter it from U.S. lawsuits?
Defenders (apologists) of Khadr crow on that he only confessed after being tortured at the Guantanamo prison. Kadhr is reported to have said to his Guantanamo guards that the day he killed American army medic Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer was the best day of his life.
Khadr was also filmed building IEDs, bombs that may have been used to kill/injure Canadian and other coalition soldiers in Afghanistan.
It’s also a valid point to say that Canadians can agree that his Charter rights were violated, but reject the idea that he receives $10.5 million. Maybe his “compensation” is not only that he gets to come back to Canada, but that he’s still alive. After being shot by American soldiers, and after killing Sergeant Speer and wounding Sergeant First Class Layne Morris, those same soldiers administered medical aid to Kadhr, saving his life.
Kadhr was NOT by definition a “child solder” under Muslim law. Secular Muslim and Toronto Sun columnist Farzana Hassan notes in her column, “Under Islamic beliefs, Omar Khadr was no child” (7 July 2017), that among other things, “Accepted Islamic belief confirms the age of maturity at puberty.”
If Omar Khadr was truly a naive “kid” who was led astray by his terrorist father, then why has he never publicly denounced his family, especially his father, for leading him down an extremist path?
It’s been debated over and over as to whether Omar was willingly participating in actions as an enemy combatant or if he even understood the gravity of the actions he was taking given his young age, but given what journalist and secular Muslim Tarek Fatah points out in “Canada rewards terrorists, Israel punishes them” (Toronto Sun, 4 July 2017), it’s likely that he knew perfectly well what he was doing and was a willing participant.
Commentator and author Rex Murphy commented in his column “Justin Trudeau skips the theme socks for his scheming Omar Khadr apology” (National Post, 7 July 2017): “A government famously so sluggish in so many areas — veterans’ treatment comes first to mind — went full Road Runner getting the cash to Khadr.”
**
When it was the right sort of foreign donations to the right kind of cause — donations that helped the Liberals in the October 2015 federal election, for example — the Liberals were sanguine about U.S. money pouring in, even though the donations appeared to be in contravention of the Canada Elections Act. A report by a registered society called Canada Decides concluded that “the 2015 election was skewed by money from wealthy foreigners.”
Another “right sort” of foreign donors are anti-fossil fuels activists, in particular the deeply controversial and notoriously anti-oil Tides Foundation. An inquiry into the scale of foreign funds aimed at damaging Alberta’s oil and gas industry, launched by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s government, issued a report last October that found foreign donors had provided nearly $1.3 billion for environmental campaigns between 2003 and 2019.
Of that total, the report found that $54.1 million in foreign funds, representing 21 groups, were targeted specifically at “anti-Alberta resource development activity.” In an interview, Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage said, “We have a right to be outraged.”
They sure do, but, as the report’s presiding accountant, Steve Allan, conceded, “No individual or organization, in my view, has done anything illegal. Indeed, they have exercised their rights of free speech.”
Compare Mr. Allan’s honourable perspective to that expressed in an interview of Justice Minister David Lametti by CTV Power Play host Evan Solomon on Feb. 17 regarding the effects of the Emergencies Act on individual donors to the convoy. Solomon put the question: “’A lot of folks said, ‘I just don’t like your vaccine mandates and I donated to this, now it’s illegal, should I be worried that the bank can freeze my account?’”
Lametti complacently (some might say eagerly) answered that yes, some donors’ accounts would be targeted: “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement, who’s donating hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be (worried).” (Note: There’s nothing to stop them from reducing the triggering amount.)
Lametti’s unbounded contempt for the protesters and their supporters is encapsulated in his reference to the “pro-Trump movement.” For Trudeau and his entourage, the words “pro-Trump” and “white supremacist” are likely complementary, if not interchangeable.
Speaking of Trump, Trudeau’s hypocrisy on foreign political influences doesn’t stop at double standards on funding. I am trying very hard to imagine the reaction of Trudeau and his apparatchiks to a Conservative party leader seeking endorsement from any former U.S. president, let alone Donald Trump, during an election campaign. The Liberals’ fainting couches for recovery from the shock of such blatant foreign interference would surely be in high demand.
And yet Trudeau had no such concerns when, barely holding his own in the polls, and with everything at stake, he welcomed Barack Obama’s intervention, just days ahead of the 2019 election. “I was proud to work with Justin Trudeau as president,” tweeted Obama. “He’s a hard-working, effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change.” In a further oleaginous nudge, Obama wrote, “The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbors to the north support him for another term.”
**
It turns out that not only do the Physicals still exist, and are (for now) still able to drive themselves into the heart of the cities, they actually still have power – a lot of power. In the middle of a supply chain crisis, those truckers represent the total reliance of the ruling elite on the very people they find alien and abhorrent. To many of the Virtuals, this is existentially frightening.
The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable.
Their first reaction was to dismiss the 50,000-strong convoy as representing, in Trudeau’s words, a “small fringe minority with unacceptable views.” Being, after all, divorced from reality, he did not seem to have any understanding of the implications of what was barreling toward him. No one in his government seems to have prepared at all in the days leading up to the truckers’ arrival as the Freedom Convoy drove all the way across the country to Ottawa.
But once they grasped the situation, the Virtuals’ response was to turn immediately to their default means of dealing with any problem: narrative and informational control.
Trudeau checked his diary list of most used phrases and – after fleeing the city for “security reasons” – unleashed all of them at once in one great shotgun blast of smears, saying the truckers were guilty of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia,” not to mention “misogyny” and being “anti-science.” He accused them of flying “racist flags” and “waving swastikas” (only one seems to have ever been spotted, before being swiftly ejected by the crowd), and announced that he would refuse to meet with them because of he could not go “anywhere near protests that have expressed hateful rhetoric and violence.” He declared Canadians to be “shocked and frankly, disgusted” with the protestors.
His class allies leaped to the same line of attack. Catherine McKenney, Ottawa’s non-binary, social justice-loving councilor, accused the Freedom Convoy of promoting “very right-wing extremist messages” and being “part of a movement, that is extreme and that is xenophobic.” Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly declared them to be “increasingly dangerous” and “hateful.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford labeled it “an occupation” and a “siege.” The chair of the city’s police services board ranted that the “siege” was part of a “nationwide insurrection” and “a threat to our democracy.” Angry demands started being made for Trudeau to call in the military.
Canadian state media lustily played along, attempting to ham-fistedly shove the whole phenomenon into an American political frame. The whole convoy was a “pseudo-Trumpian grift” that was “organized and led by documented racists and QAnon-style nutters.” Anchors gravely compared footage of smiling, Canadian flag waving grandmas, diverse crowds of dancing Sikhs, and children playing in bouncy castles to “January 6” and “white supremacy.” American outlets like Politico and the New York Times warned of the “far-right” having been “galvanized” worldwide. Allegations of the protests having been organized and funded by no less than the Russians were seriously aired.
Academic “extremism experts” were trundled onto television to confirm that this was in fact a pack of literal terrorists, and that if even the protests were technically entirely peaceful (crime in downtown Ottawa having actually fallen), this was only a maliciously cunning cover to enable mass violence. “By what common understanding of the term does what we are seeing on the ground, on TV, in our social media feeds qualify as ‘peaceful protest?’” asked one, presumably talking about the hug-ins, or maybe the on-site meals for the homeless. “Is it merely the absence of physical violence and injury? That’s not unimportant but is insufficient as a definitional threshold.” TV talking heads nod sagely.
Facebook and Twitter of course also quickly shut down the accounts and groups set up by protestors to communicate (often with hundreds of thousands of members), not only in Canada but in countries across the world. They cited the need to prevent the spread of “misinformation.”
If all this seemed awfully synchronized, that’s the whole point. Systematic information control, or what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as “public opinion management,” is now the entire strategic response of the Virtual class to every political problem.
But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).
Normally all one need do is recast the dominant narrative of events in such a way as to allow the system to reestablish compliance by enough links in the informational control chains to inspire physical action in meat space – or at least just distract the public until the problem goes away. The problem is that none of this has worked to move the trucks.
The Virtual class can’t move the trucks. Smears alone can’t move trucks. All the towing companies in Ottawa have refused to move the trucks. Because, surprisingly, it turns out tow truck drivers also drive trucks for a living. There aren’t enough police to seize the trucks, because the rank and file police in Ottawa have been taking all of their vacation and sick days, mysteriously not showing up for work, or simply resigning. It turns out that police officers tend to also be part of the Physical class, and class solidarity may actually be a thing.
Meanwhile, even the narrative reframing trick – which usually works great – has been failing. There’s simply been too wide a gulf between what citizens have been told and what they can see with their own eyes. Sympathy for the truckers’ cause actually seems to have grown. More than half of Canadians now oppose continuing to mandate vaccines, and two-thirds now support removing COVID-19 restrictions. Multiple Liberal MPs have turned on Trudeau to speak out against his approach. Five provinces have now moved to end pandemic restrictions, including Ontario.
No matter how desperately Trudeau has scrambled to change the narrative, he hasn’t yet succeeded. Even a gambit to threaten the truckers with having their children removed by child protection services – presumably to make it easier to instigate a narratively convenient violent confrontation – has only led to backlash so far. Relentless discipline by the truckers has provided him with almost nothing to work with.
Which is why the Virtual elite have steadily escalated up the ladder of more and more coercive informational control, leveraging their hold on state power to try to compel compliance by the revolting Physicals. This began with the government requesting crowdfunding site GoFundMe shut down the $10 million in funds raised there for the truckers. The company complied immediately, saying the Freedom Convoy had engaged in “an abuse of power” (what power was unclear) and was supporting “hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, and intolerance.” Then came as many legal fines for obscure violations as authorities could find to throw at the truckers, while a replacement fundraiser on GiveSendGo was also frozen by a Canadian court.
But now, with the protests in their third week, Trudeau has gone nuclear, invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act for the first time in its history. A renamed version of what was once called the War Measures Act, this allows him to override civil liberty protections in order “to remove the blockades, including by force.” Trudeau specified this includes the ability to compel the tow companies to move the trucks.
And while Trudeau has denied that he will use his new powers to deploy the military against the Canadian people, his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that financial institutions will be instructed to “cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” and that that they “will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order” and with full “protection against civil liability.” All crowd-funding platforms will now also fall under the control of “Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules,” which will require fundraising campaigns to be approved by Canadian intelligence services.
That Trudeau’s government would choose to jettison any remaining illusion of Canada still being a liberal democracy just to harm their political class enemies isn’t too surprising. It’s their method of doing so that is particularly striking: control over digital financial assets is pretty much the ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals. We should expect more use of this tool around the world anywhere the Physicals continue to revolt against their masters.
**
Ottawa businesses are preparing for the arrival of the 'freedom convoy' this weekend, as a convoy of truckers calling for an end to COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions moves towards the capital. ...
"We just have been told there will be extra protection and just take precautions," says Pat Nicastro, owner of La Bottega Nicastro in the Byward Market.
"But Saturday is business as usual here. Our staff is going to be here, we’re working. We’ve been told by a couple of groups that have come in and ordered some sandwiches and stuff and we’re here to shop and everything is going to be peaceful and we’re not there to make any trouble." ...
Kevin McHale, executive director with the Sparks Street Business Improvement Association, says many of the shops on Sparks Street, which is one block south from Parliament Hill, will remain open.
"We’re at the heart of a capital city; we see protests and activations like this all the time, we’re used to it here," says McHale, adding that it’s usually thousands of people protesting.
**
"We got a call from the team saying, ‘We’re getting phone calls here,'" Giuliani told the Ottawa Citizen. "I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘They’re threatening to throw bricks through our window. They’re threatening to come and get us.’ We said, ‘Lock the door and we’ll find out what’s going on.'"
**
The federal government has announced $20 million in support for local businesses in Ottawa that have been impacted by the ongoing blockade due to protests against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other public health measures.
The businesses that were shut down because of the lockdowns and will still flounder when Ottawa is boycotted (because who wants to be pepper-sprayed in the face?).
Those ones.
**
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says the Emergencies Acts gives powers not only to the feds but also to municipalities and provinces, after Ottawa’s mayor said two days earlier said that he wanted the vehicles towed during police operations against protesters to be sold to cover the city’s costs incurred by the protests of the past three weeks.
All because Jim was too weak to handle all of this.
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